Facebook – Profile or Business Page?

by Christi on January 3, 2011

In the last few weeks I have been invited to become Facebook “friends” with many businesses. As you know, we love small businesses and want to be friends! However, I’m concerned for all of these businesses that I am friends with. Here is why:

Profiles are for people

Pages are for businesses

By creating a profile page for a business, those businesses are violating Facebook’s terms of service. By the way, they are also missing out on some great advantages that businesses with pages get.

Did you know that a business page on Facebook has some interesting analytic tools that are not available to profiles? Business pages also can be “liked” by anyone. You don’t have to approve and they don’t have to ask- what a great advantage! One profile can create as many business pages as they like. Search engines index business pages!

Those are some great advantages to businesses. Violating Facebook TOS is not an advantage. It is a big disadvantage!

Okay, so if you have already mistakenly created a profile for you business instead of a business page, what can you do to fix it? Log in to Facebook and go here to start creating your official business page. Once you have that set up, invite your “friends” to come and “like” you page. Then all you have to do is disable your business profile and you are good to go! Couldn’t be any easier and now you can start growing your business with Facebook the right way!

One comment on “Facebook – Profile or Business Page?”

Great and VERY timely article guys…in fact you beat me to the punch, had a draft of the same thing to finish later but yours is much better so will just share yours! The issue of violating the Terms of Service is a big point as someone who got “booted off Twitter” for violating their TOS once these guys are serious would be horrible for a small business using a profile and having a couple thousand “friends” to their business wake up one morning and find it all gone! will share this with my network…thanks again guys.